Water.....

[Not DJSapp]

With federal disasters, it’s a % of the estimated total disaster response/recovery that typically goes to hazard mitigation. If I remember right, the state is swimming with hazard mitigation funds and struggling with the planning, design, and implementation. I haven’t thought or read deeply enough about the hold-up, but am guessing that it is mostly red tape.

Not true.

We were invited to bid the massive highway repairs in CO from the 2013 floods. There were very strict rules surrounding the money from FEMA that it could only be used to replace existing heavy infrastructure facilities in kind (to current building code), which we thought was epically stupid because the old design and highway route was deficient and it was plainly obvious it would fail again. It was explicitly specific that it could not be used for improvements or betterments. The entire reason behind these rules on funding is that so the states don't decide to neglect maintenance and improvement programs, let a disaster strike, and then use Federal money to improve their State with other people's money. Makes some sense.

Now there are lots of other Federal programs out there that provide money for improvements and hazard mitigation, but the sweet, sweet, blank checks that FEMA can write have rules.

[bodywhomper]

Not true.

We were invited to bid the massive highway repairs in CO from the 2013 floods. There were very strict rules surrounding the money from FEMA that it could only be used to replace existing heavy infrastructure facilities in kind (to current building code), which we thought was epically stupid because the old design and highway route was deficient and it was plainly obvious it would fail again. It was explicitly specific that it could not be used for improvements or betterments. The entire reason behind these rules on funding is that so the states don't decide to neglect maintenance and improvement programs, let a disaster strike, and then use Federal money to improve their State with other people's money. Makes some sense.

Now there are lots of other Federal programs out there that provide money for improvements and hazard mitigation, but the sweet, sweet, blank checks that FEMA can write have rules.

What I am saying is true.

Getting into the weeds a bit, the road reconstruction was funded under FEMA's public assistance program (disaster recovery) and apparently did not include any FEMA "406" Public Assistance Hazard Mitigation funding to improve that segment of road. This was a decision likely based on the damage assessment and decisions mutually made by the State and federal government. I don't disagree with you that it's messed-up.

What I was referencing is FEMA's "404 Hazard Mitigation Grant Program." Funding for that program is based on "a percentage of the Total Federal share of the declared disaster damage amount...."

https://www.fema.gov/press-release/2...ts-404-and-406

[gravitylover]

https://www.wired.com/story/the-key-...n-underground/

[Squirreljam]

Not really new, original info about this was in post #7, but here’s the nyt’s take on it.
It’s interesting to me how the dirt pimps sub-subdivided the land to get around the proof-of-supply requirements. The intersection of law, policy and human greed is a bitch.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/u...smid=share-url

[old goat]

I hope my kid gets out of Las Vegas while he can still sell his house. That will be up to the Air Force.

[Bunion 2020]

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The survival — or at least the basic sustenance — of hundreds in a desert community amid the horse ranches and golf courses outside Phoenix now rests on a 54-year-old man with a plastic bucket of quarters.

John Hornewer picked up a quarter and put it in the slot. The lone water hose at a remote public filling station sputtered to life and splashed 73 gallons into the steel tank of Hornewer’s water hauling truck. After two minutes, it stopped. Hornewer, one of two main suppliers responsible for delivering water to a community of more than 2,000 homes known as Rio Verde Foothills, fished out another quarter.

“It so shouldn’t be like this,” Hornewer said.

Some living here amid the cactus and creosote bushes see themselves as the first domino to fall as the Colorado River tips further into crisis. On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply that it has relied on for decades. The result is a disorienting and frightening lack of certainty about how residents will find enough water as their tanks run down in coming weeks, with a bitter political feud impacting possible solutions.

The city’s decision — and the failure to find a dependable alternative — has forced water haulers like Hornewer to scour distant towns for any available gallons. About a quarter of the homes in Rio Verde Foothills, a checkerboard of one-acre lots linked by dirt roads in an unincorporated part of Maricopa County, rely on water from a municipal pipe hauled by trucks. Since the cutoff, their water prices have nearly tripled. The others have wells, though many of these have gone dry as the water table has fallen by hundreds of feet in some places after years of drought.

“This is a real hard slap in the face to everybody,” said Hornewer, who has been hauling water to his neighbors for more than two decades. “It’s not sustainable. We’re not going to make it through a summer like this.”

This grim forecast prompted Scottsdale to warn Rio Verde Foothills more than a year ago that their water supply would be cut off. City officials stressed their priority was to their own residents and cast Rio Verde Foothills as a boomtown of irresponsible development, fed by noisy water trucks rumbling over city streets. “The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community especially given its unlimited and unregulated growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.

Scottsdale Mayor David Ortega was unmoved when his Rio Verde Foothills neighbors cried foul.

“There is no Santa Claus,” he said in a statement last month. “The megadrought tells us all — water is not a compassion game.”

With growing urgency, Rio Verde Foothills residents have pursued two main alternatives to find a new source of water, although bitter disagreements over the best solution have divided the community and pitted neighbors against each other.

For the past several years, some residents have sought to form their own water district that would allow the community to buy water from elsewhere in the state and import what they need, more than 100 acre-feet of water per year. Another group prefers enlisting a Canadian private utility company, Epcor, to supply the community, as it does with neighboring areas. But political disputes have so far foiled both approaches.

The water district plan — which supporters say would give them long-term access to a reliable source of water — was rejected in August by the Maricopa County supervisors. The supervisor for the area, Thomas Galvin, said he opposed adding a new layer of government to a community that prizes its freedom, particularly one run by neighbors with the authority to condemn property to build infrastructure.

Galvin preferred Epcor, a utility that, if approved, would be regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission.

The water district “would be subject to the whims of five local lay people serving on its board. Whereas Epcor cannot assess anything on these folks unless the corporation commission approves it,” Galvin said in an interview. “To me, it was just a sensible plan all around.”

Scottsdale officials didn’t see it that way. To avoid an interruption of service to Rio Verde Foothills, Epcor needed Scottsdale to agree to treat the water it would provide — but the city has not agreed to do so.

That has left Rio Verde Foothills without any clear path to solve their water problem. Some homeowners have sued to challenge the Maricopa County decision to block the water district. And a larger group of residents filed a lawsuit Thursday in Maricopa County Superior Court seeking an injunction against Scottsdale to force the city to reopen its taps.

“What Scottsdale has done is inhumane. Dangerous. They’ve left us without fire protection. They’ve left us without water for families,” said Christy Jackman, a resident who helped lead an effort to raise thousands of dollars to pay lawyers to seek the injunction. “Mostly what we have right now is palpable fear.”

Two days before the cut off, Stephen Coniaris, a retired emergency room physician, had his 5,000 gallon underground storage tank topped off. His solar-powered home overlooking the McDowell Mountains was already well-equipped to conserve through the worst drought in a millennium. He had a low-volume dishwasher; a toilet that consumed just 0.9 gallons per flush.

But this new dilemma has pushed Coniaris and his wife, Donna Rice, into more extreme territory. They joined a gym in Scottsdale to take showers. They haul dirty clothes to friends’ homes or a laundromat. Plastic buckets in the backyard collect the rainwater, however rare, that falls from spouts off the roof. This goes into 3.5-gallon plastic jugs stationed in the bathroom to flush the toilet — although they now usually make other arrangements.

“We pee outside,” Coniaris mentioned, as he ate his lunch of barbecued chicken off paper plates, to avoid doing dishes.

These measures have dropped the couple’s average water consumption from 200 gallons per day last year to 30 gallons per day in the first week of January, as they anxiously await a solution for their community. As the cutoff deadline approached last year, some neighbors sold their homes, and others have watched property values decline.

Rice said they are not planning to sell, but she couldn’t imagine much demand in any case.

“It would be crazy to buy our house at this point,” she said.

But staying will grow increasingly fraught the longer Rio Verde Foothills must rely on distant sources of hauled water.

Cody Reim, who works for a company that installs metal roofing, normally pays $380 a month for the roughly 10,000 gallons per month he consumes along with his wife and four young children. If his family continues to use water at the same pace, the new prices will put his next bill at $1,340 per month, he said, almost as much as his mortgage payment.

“That’s a life-changing amount of money for me,” he said.

Reim has called or emailed all of his state and federal representatives, with most ignoring his inquiries, he said, and visited the state legislature last month to try to speak with Arizona’s former governor. On Tuesday, he attended a protest at city hall in Scottsdale — the city where his children attend school, where his family does nearly all its shopping — to demand water for his community.

“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.

“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there’s going to be help.”
‘You fill this whole thing up with water?’

The help, for now, is Hornewer, and the other water haulers who service Rio Verde Foothills.

Until this year, the six trucks in his family-run business, relied on the nearby Scottsdale filling station. It would take about 15 minutes, he said, to fill his 6,000 gallon tank, quickly punching a code into the automated system and receiving his torrent of water.

On Saturday, he spent an hour driving 45 miles to Apache Junction, one of the few towns in the vicinity with an available filling station, a small cinder block house with a single hose. It now takes 85 quarters — and nearly three hours — to fill up.

“I’ll do what I have to do for my people,” he said. “But wow, this is getting stupid.”

As Hornewer waited, other people with trailer-loaded personal water tanks drove up, impatiently eyeing his commercial hauler. One of those idling behind him, a man in a cowboy hat and a checked shirt, eventually got out of his pickup and sauntered over. He rapped his knuckles on Hornewer’s tank.

“You fill this whole thing up with water?” he asked. “Serious?”

The tedious process has reduced the number of possible water loads Hornewer’s company can make by 75 percent. Driving this far in a truck that consumes a gallon of diesel every 3.5 miles, has dramatically increased his costs. During hot summer months, when water usage spikes, the math on how he might satisfy the Rio Verde Foothills water demand simply does not add up, he said.

“We’ve got two months. And then we’re done,” he said. “In two months, it’s not going to matter how much money you have. In two months, it’s going to be: You’re going to get your allocation, your ration of water: use it wisely.”

Ouch

[Meadow Skipper]

These paragraphs from that NY Times article were pretty telling.

People in Rio Verde Foothills are bitterly divided over how to resolve their water woes.

When some proposed forming their own self-funded water provider, other residents revolted, saying the idea would foist an expensive, freedom-stealing new arm of government on them. The idea collapsed. Other solutions, like allowing a larger water utility to serve the area, could be years off.

On Thursday, a group of residents sued Scottsdale in an effort to get the water turned back on. They argued the city violated an Arizona law that restricts cities from cutting off utility services to customers outside their borders. Scottsdale did not respond to the lawsuit.

Good luck to them.

[nickwm21]

I’ve got no sympathy for Maricopa Co.

100 yards from people paying out the ass to truck in water, private golf communities are watering fairways and clubhouse landscaping…


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[Not DJSapp]

So you built a community of million dollar homes 20 miles NE of Scottsdale specifically to dodge municipal rules, without a water supply, in a desert, and now you're surprised that the city you were leeching water from has cut you off and you've done nothing as a contingency plan?

Life is hard. It's a lot harder when you're stupid.

[east or bust]

Interesting article. I lived in Scottsdale proper for a couple years, glad I no longer do... mostly due to the people.


Got to wonder what type of deal Rio Verde worked out with the city of Scottsdale for the original supply of water. Either way sucks for the people that live there, could be partly their fault for living there but I don't have enough details to know that. Recent census count of over 2000 people, that's a lot of people for a community like that.

According to SRP's website, they deliver 800,000 acre feet of water to the valley every year. This dispute accounts for 0.0125% of that.
https://www.srpnet.com/grid-water-ma...rigation-works

azwater.gov sites that about 74% of available water is used for irrigated agricultural purposes. I would imagine that number applies to the state, so probably slightly different figure for the valley.
https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture
Either way, it's close enough to question why the fuck we're growing food in the desert, that's not inside a greenhouse. I remember those balmy summer mornings, about 5am and 100F out on the grade where the humidly was above 80-100% due to the adjacent farms flood irrigating. Talk about stupid.

[TBS]

That whole area has been a shitstorm of unrestricted growth
Now the cost of freedom comes due...

[SumJongGuy]

We don't want no stinking overbearing gubbermint socialism in our community.. .. We demand you give us public water from your socialist community for free

[Buster Highmen]

THese passages:

...
The water district plan — which supporters say would give them long-term access to a reliable source of water — was rejected in August by the Maricopa County supervisors. The supervisor for the area, Thomas Galvin, said he opposed adding a new layer of government to a community that prizes its freedom, particularly one run by neighbors with the authority to condemn property to build infrastructure.

Galvin preferred Epcor, a utility that, if approved, would be regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission.

The water district “would be subject to the whims of five local lay people serving on its board. Whereas Epcor cannot assess anything on these folks unless the corporation commission approves it,” Galvin said in an interview. “To me, it was just a sensible plan all around.”

I've never understood the claim that it's better to put our trust in corporations than in Democracy, It does explain some of the politics in America.

[SumJongGuy]

What are the major financial and logistical barriers to digging/damming some massive new man made lakes to capture all this flooding for dryer times ahead each season? Talking mostly about Cali but if Nevada and NM have similar winter flooding why not there too?

We all know there will be less snowpack and more rain instead ahead.. Build dirt based storage since the snowpack doesn't seem to be as viable, especially 50 years from now.

[Not DJSapp]

What are the major financial and logistical barriers to digging/damming some massive new man made lakes to capture all this flooding for dryer times ahead each season? Talking mostly about Cali but if Nevada and NM have similar winter flooding why not there too?

We all know there will be less snowpack and more rain instead ahead.. Build dirt based storage since the snowpack doesn't seem to be as viable, especially 50 years from now.

Answers one page back

1. The shear volume of water. If you don't like Winnipeasauke as a unit of measure, the capacity of Lake Mead is 9.4 trillion gallons. We just got 2.7 Lake Meads dumped on the state. Probably closer to 3 since that count was on last Wednesday.

Attachment 442386

2. The massive area of where that water falls, and how to reinject it into the soil, and possibly reuse old oil wells

The concept is quite easy. The magnitude at which is would need to be done is hard. Let's talk through it:

You can't concentrate all of the water in one place. You'd need recharge wells everywhere. I don't know what the right number is, so let's say one per 50 acres.The Central Valley is 27,000 square miles, or 17,280,000 acres. At 1 pump per 50 acres, that is ~350,000 pumps.


A decent depth irrigation well in CA runs ~$100/foot of depth but recharge wells are more complicated so assume $200/foot. Irrigation wells go to around 500', so assume 1000' depth for a recharge well to let it filter back up to the 500 foot layer. That is 200k per well, which is $70 billion just to build the wells. That's a lot. We're also assuming the handful of well contractors in CA have infinite resources and won't start jacking up prices after the first 10,000 wells.


Now you have to channel all of the water to those wells. Let's just assume between farmers and urban planning that just magically happens. Next you need the electricity to power those wells which will require an upgrade to the energy grid. Then, you'll realize all of these pumps need to run all at the same time during and right after the storms which puts a 26,250 MW (assume a 100 hp pump (75kw)) on the grid. Looking at CalISO's site, today's energy forecast for the whole damn state is 28,200 MW. These pumps will double our total energy use. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx


So back to my point on people not understanding the order of magnitude of the issue. The solutions are simple. The size is hard.

There have been ~250,000 oil wells drilled in CA since the late 1800's, the majority of them are in Kern County (which could be useful) and the LA basin (not as useful, they're very close to the ocean and LA doesn't pump much groundwater as salinity becomes an issue) so rerouting isn't really viable. Most of these wells are actually plugged to boot. This is also assuming the wells that aren't plugged are in a condition that they could even handle being converted which is probably not likely.

I'm all for seeing the potential of big projects, but the first step into action is realizing the size of the task. I'm a believer in big public works like CA high speed rail, but getting money for large public works projects is hard. Really, really, REALLY hard. You have to show real results and quickly or else the program can go down the tubes (CAHSR isn't doing well with this). The dollars I was quoting is actual construction cost, so the whole program would cost 3x that to go through all the red tape. So we're talking about a dollar amount that is 20% of the entire infrastructure bill, just to build the pumps. Upgrading the energy situation is something I don't know how to put a price tag on. How's that cold fusion coming along?

Nothing in construction is impossible. The issues always come from a matter of pubilc goodwill and funding. We could solve water in California for $2 trillion dollars, sure. But people would rather pay $6 for lettuce.

Point of reference on the power usage: during the September heat wave in 2022, rolling blackouts were initiated by CalISO as the grid hit 49,000 MW demand. The grid cannot deliver this amount of power without significant upgrades.

[PB]

It's amazing how similar water is to power.

[SumJongGuy]

Answers one page back

1. The shear volume of water. If you don't like Winnipeasauke as a unit of measure, the capacity of Lake Mead is 9.4 trillion gallons. We just got 2.7 Lake Meads dumped on the state. Probably closer to 3 since that count was on last Wednesday.

They don't have to contain ALL of it... Some is better than none no???

[Skistack]

So you built a community of million dollar homes 20 miles NE of Scottsdale specifically to dodge municipal rules, without a water supply, in a desert, and now you're surprised that the city you were leeching water from has cut you off and you've done nothing as a contingency plan?

Life is hard. It's a lot harder when you're stupid.

Freedom isn’t free.


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[El Chupacabra]

Freedom isn’t free.


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It costs $1.95.

[John_B]

It costs $1.95.

And that's Buy One Get One price!

[paulster2626]

It's amazing how similar water is to power.

You might enjoy the Dune series of books. Water and Spice. It's all that matters.

[paulster2626]

THese passages:


I've never understood the claim that it's better to put our trust in corporations than in Democracy, It does explain some of the politics in America.

Because apparently socialism = communism, which is always bad! You don't want to end up like Canada or something, do you?

[Buster Highmen]

You don't want to end up like Canada or something, do you?

An icy and mosquito infested swamp? God no.

[fastfred]

We don't want no stinking overbearing gubbermint socialism in our community.. .. We demand you give us public water from your socialist community for free

the article I read this morning was some variation of the one posted above
there was a direct quote from someone who thought the idea of creating a metro district to help purchase and supply water to the area would be goverment over reach and part of some sort of communist control
yup wither away please

So you built a community of million dollar homes 20 miles NE of Scottsdale specifically to dodge municipal rules, without a water supply, in a desert, and now you're surprised that the city you were leeching water from has cut you off and you've done nothing as a contingency plan?

Life is hard. It's a lot harder when you're stupid.

started reading the article and sort of felt sorry for these people and that scotttsdale turned the faucet off
then I find out that they bought purposely bought a house with no well and no water system and no secure delivery system
I don't feel sorry for them

then again spent alot of time in fountain hills the lushest greenest grass in the country in their sprawling park plus the lake and fountain that shoots water in the air surrounded by?????

[bagtagley]

It costs $1.95.

Last I heard, freedom cost a buck o’ five.